This blog is about various boat and environment related topics that I care to comment on. First and foremost, this blog is about skin on frame boats, their construction and use, as well as paddle and other stuff related to skin boat use.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Ancient People of the Arctic

You can't really click to look inside. You will have to go to Amazon to do that, but that's the cover of Ancient People of the Arctic, Robert McGhee, author, a book I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the prehistory of the Canadian Arctic. The title is a little misleading since it suggests that it covers all of the Arctic. It doesn't. Its focus is on present day Canada. Still, you will find lots of good stuff here. There isn't much about kayaks here, but plenty of other amazing stuff.
The main insight that the book offered to me was the notion of what makes a place a good place to live. Why would anyone choose to live in the Arctic? The answer apparently is availability of food. The Arctic was a place where you could catch lots of sea mammals and therefore have a diet rich in protein and fat. Climate was a secondary consideration. Nowadays, we think of places like Southern California as desirable places to live, based mostly on year-round pleasant temperatures. Perhaps, now that we can ship food from elsewhere and move water around to raise crops in the desert, but two thousand years ago the Canadian Arctic may have looked more attractive to a people that had the appropriate technology to exploit the food resources of the region and stay warm. Californians meanwhile were subsisting on a diet consisting mostly of grass seed and the occasional rabbit or deer.
The Arctic may well have been a homeland of choice rather than a consolation prize for late arrivals unable to move into territory already occupied by paleo Indians.

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About Me

I like to look into old and mostly abandoned technologies that people used before the industrial age and also technologies that were used in non agricultural societies. I have a hunch that some of these technologies will again become relevant in a more resource-poor future.
If you want to contact me directly, you can reach me at: my first name followed by nomadic at gmail dot com